The role of the Baroness might end up going to Emma Thompson instead of Nicole Kidman. We also have a new synopsis for the movie.

Quote:

Emma Thompson is in early talks to join Emma Stone in Disney’s live-action movie Cruella, which tells the origin story of 101 Dalmatians villain Cruella de Vil, Collider has confirmed. Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) is directing from a script by Tony McNamara and Dana Fox. Marc Platt and Kristin Burr are producing along with Andrew Gunn, and Disney will release the movie on Dec. 23, 2020.

Set in London in the high fashion world of the 1970’s, Cruella finds Stone playing a brilliant clothing designer who nonetheless toils as a lowly department store worker. One day, a posh woman known as the Baroness enters the store, wearing Cruella’s special locket that was given to her by her mother — one that Cruella lost on the same night her mother passed away at the Baroness’ estate. She promptly decides she’ll do whatever it takes to get her locket back from the Baroness, including crashing her glitzy ball.

In the original 1961 animated classic, Cruella was a villain obsessed with capturing the titular dogs, and the new film will explain why dogs are so important to the character’s backstory.

Wow, this sounds...utterly horrendous. I can detect the revisionism of Maleficent in every sentence here. Has Disney forgotten that Cruella, both in the book and in their various movies, is a rich heiress? She was never a shopkeeper of all things, lor even self-made. It's clear Disney wants to go the underdog treatment with Stone somehow being betrayed/corrupted by the Baroness character who will be the ultimate villain to blame at the end so Cruella can go scott free and be viewed as noble all along.

Maybe Disney will have enough sense so that Cruella was born rich here, hence why her mother was friends with the Baroness, but she ends up losing her immense wealth and the reason for her fall is connected to this locket and the Baroness. By the end of the film, after defeating the Baroness, she'll resume her high place in society, but somehow I doubt Disney will go that route. I wonder why it hasn't dawned on them yet that the reason characters like Maleficent and Cruella are so beloved is precisely because they are evil. Audiences don't want to see neutered versions of them whose "tragic" backstories are responsible for making them do a sorta evil thing once before immediately trying to make things right for the rest of the film.

Oh, I didn't know she was always a rich heiress. I hope she was rich, loses it, and gets it back like you said. And yes, come on, some people are just evil when they don't like stuff that happened or want something!

I dont know...I have always liked the "villain joins forces with the hero to defeat a bigger baddy trope", I think if they wanted a new Dalmatians movie with a more sympathetic Cruella that would have been a better way to do it. This though, this really depends on how its handled. I just cant see an angle were Cruella's cruelty to dogs is given a sympathetic angle unless they imply that its a psychotic/mental illness triggered by past trauma/abuse...which can be very tricky to portray/ b/c then the movie jumps into very dark serious subject matter that doesn't really belong in a big budget Hollywood popcorn family film.

Can you imagine the outrage if they made Gaston or Prince Hans movies and gave them tragic backstories?

I just cant see an angle were Cruella's cruelty to dogs is given a sympathetic angle unless they imply that its a psychotic/mental illness triggered by past trauma/abuse.

The thing is Cruella never hated dogs. She simply loved fur and didn't care which animals or how many of them had to lose their lives to get it. She wanted a spotted fur coat. I supposed she could have tried hunting down snow leopards but those are much more difficult to come by. Her only mistake (i.e. plot contrivance) was not buying dalamatians from somewhere else when Anita turned her down. No one would have been the wiser if she had.

Ultimately her impatience to have what she wants immediately and her spite in wanting to get back at Anita (because she's a spoiled brat, basically) is where she screws up.

The thing is, you can't really make a movie focused specifically on a character like Cruella unless you alter the character one way or the other. Either you give her some kind of backstory of abuse/trauma or a mental illness that inevitably makes her somewhat sympathetic, or you have to make her even crazier than she was in order to fill a film of her that's supposed to revolve around her being a lunatic. In the latter case, I can picture a story where Cruella (like most psychopaths) exhibits disturbing behavior as a child that terrifies her parents, then grows up even more dangerous and terrifies/endangers the people around her as an adult, etc. etc., but even that would require another lead during the adult half for Cruella to be treated like the villain in a slasher movie.

But Disney would never have the balls to do that because a film based on a character well-known from a children's film has to ultimately be made with a family audience in mind. Trying to make a movie of her "life" without either a sympathetic backstory or making her more dangerous/crazy than she was would mean a movie only of flashbacks to her acting like a spoiled brat as a child and then a spoiled brat as a teenager in college and then as a spoiled brat as an adult. That wouldn't be captivating enough to make up an entire film, so the only other option is a backstory that ends up humanizing her to a degree.

Can you imagine the outrage if they made Gaston or Prince Hans movies and gave them tragic backstories?

They sorta did that with Gaston in the live-action BATB, pointing out that he has severe PTSD from his time in the war. But much like everything else in that film, it's something new that is briefly mentioned and never touched up on again, let alone properly developed.

Sotiris wrote:

The thing is Cruella never hated dogs. She simply loved fur and didn't care which animals or how many of them had to lose their lives to get it. She wanted a spotted fur coat. I supposed she could have tried hunting down snow leopards but those are much more difficult to come by. Her only mistake (i.e. plot contrivance) was not buying dalamatians from somewhere else when Anita turned her down. No one would have been the wiser if she had.

Agreed. She's a psychopath who doesn't caring about who she harms in order to get what she wants. She sees the puppies as nothing but a source of fur for her coats and her high fashion tastes.

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